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CAD Drawings of Stringed Instrument Parts

In
any other industry manufacturers and distributors of hardware
components would make CAD drawings of those components available, so
designers wouldn't have to waste their time drawing these things from
scratch. For some reason this is not the way it works in the
stringed musical instrument business. Maybe there just aren't
enough designers using CAD software? Stewart
MacDonald has been heading in the right direction, putting
mechanical drawings of some of the components they sell in their
catalog. In any case, here are the drawings for some of the
components I have for you to download. All were drawn by me and could contain
errors. All are in zipped files containing AutoCAD 2000 or 2004
.dwg and .dxf formatted files.

Check out the page
containing tips on using the CAD drawings for more information.
Let me take this opportunity to encourage hardware and component
manufacturers to make CAD drawings of your parts available. If
you don't want to make them available on your own website, email them
to me and I'll put them up here. And if you are an instrument
designer that uses CAD software please consider sharing whatever
drawings of hardware you have with others. Again, if you email
them to me I'll make them available here (and heap you with credit
and thanks). Thanks.

A bass bridge adjuster wheel,
a scalable scroll spiral outline and a very nice Strad style ff-hole. The scroll spiral was copied
from a violin using quarter turn arcs. It is not scaled to any
particular instrument but can be scaled to suit any of the violin
family instruments. The ff-hole is also not scaled to any particular instrument but can be scaled to suit. This was drawn from great instructions by Robert J. Spear which appeared in the second part of an exquisite three part article on drawing the violin in American Lutherie #94.

This file contains top and side view
fingerboard drawings for various standard guitars and basses.
Each drawing contains 24 frets (remove what you don't need), dot
markers, strings (top view), and a proportionally spaced nut. Please
let me know if you'd like to see more of these. Also in this file is
a simple 1” fret scale. What can you do with this? Using the
Scale facility of your CAD program you can scale this up to whatever
fret scale you need.